Tagged: Public Health

As a pathologist working at two large medical centers, I have studied the effects of smoking on health for over 20 years. I’ve published scores of papers on the impressive benefits of switching from cigarettes to safer, non-combustible forms of tobacco (such as Swedish snus). This strategy – called tobacco harm reduction – has vast potential for improving public health.

A Memo released as part of an ongoing Freedom of Information Act request examining the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule-making has revealed the EPA using misleading claims to stoke fears of global warming. Big Surprise, huh!

Looming Environmental Protection Agency ozone regulations personify the Obama administration’s secrecy, collusion, fraud, and disdain for concerns about the effects that its tsunami of regulations is having on the livelihoods, living standards, health and welfare of millions of American families.

Halloween is upon us, and once again opponents of frac sand mining are trying to scare people in Wisconsin and other parts of the Upper Midwest by producing one-sided studies based on unscientific, anecdotal evidence (which is subject to cherry-picking and other biases) to back their claims. Fortunately, the scariest claims these organizations have made about the potential public health impacts of frac sand mining are not supported by the scientific data, and in many cases the data suggest just the opposite.

This week may be a turning point in the food fight that has been taking place in this country for over a decade.

An analysis published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine this week (Sept. 17) found that major food companies exceeded their pledge to Michelle Obama that they’ll reduce the calories they sell to consumers.

When Rachel Carson’s book, “Silent Spring”, was published, filled with totally false claims about DDT, the Environmental Protection Agency looked it over and concluded she had used manipulated data. They concluded that DDT should not be banned, but its first administrator, William Ruckleshaus, overruled the agency and imposed a ban.

For a half century the idea that saturated fat in foods raises cholesterol and, consequently, causes heart attacks was dogma ostensibly justifying government regulation. The attacks on dietary fat have increased in recent years due to the “war on obesity.” But a new book based on nearly ten years of research has fired a devastating salvo in defense of this designated dietary enemy. The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz traces the origin of the fat myth from its faulty scientific beginning to its discrediting.

How obscene is it for a Florida jury to award $23.6 billion to the widow of a man who died of lung cancer in 1996? She sued R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company by asserting that her husband had been “fooled” into starting the smoke at age 13. Apparently he had never heard cigarettes referred to as “coffin nails”, a slang term that has been around since the last century. And how come all those patches, chewing gum, and other means to stop smoking had no effect, if used by her late husband?

Panel 11 of the 9th International Conference on Climate Change was on the subject of “Climate Change, Human Health, and Adaptation.” The panel was primarily concerned about how climate change, and government responses to it, might affect the quality and extent of human life in the future.

There’s an interesting phenomenon playing out in both New Jersey and Ohio: Two of the country’s most prominent conservative Republican governors have proposed new taxes of a sort that haven’t appealed even to traditionally liberal, tax-hungry state legislatures in states like Massachusetts and Washington.

In a closer vote than expected, the Los Angeles City Council today voted not to carve-out an exception for bars in that city’s new ban on public vaping (the use of e-cigarettes, which emit smokeless vapor).

[Mayor] Bloomberg stands accused of not letting the public see how his team made various nanny-state laws and regulations from his (failed) soda ban to his rules against donating food to city-run homeless shelters.

Richard Craver, a writer for the Winston-Salem Journal, recently described the growing popularity of e-cigarettes. Bonnie Herzog, a Wells Fargo security analyst who has followed the tobacco industry for many years, described e-cigarettes[…]